iPolitics Insights

Stephen Harper is confounding the ring wisdom of the great Joe Louis: It turns out you can both run and hide.

Since running for and winning his seat in the 2015 election, Harper has vanished. The absence in the House of Commons of the MP for Las Vegas/Ft. Myers is beginning to pique the curiosity of people on social media.

“Too many eggs in one basket, eh? What ever happened to Harper anyway?” asked one poster.

Can’t be looking for a job in the oilpatch, answered another: “No jobs in the oil patch”.

So if he’s not in the boardrooms of Calgary, or the Commons, where can we expect him to land? Writing under the handle ‘Dr. Mike’, another wag quipped: “Mississauga Canada Post sorting station maybe????”

And this from just plain ‘Joey’: “I hope he is not a financial advisor.”

Setting the online snickering to one side, it seems clear that a lot of people are asking the question: What will the Harper legacy be? It’s an important question because the answer affects the future of the party he both created and destroyed.

The interim leader of the Conservative Party of Canada thinks history will be kind to Steve; Rona Ambrose is nothing if not loyal. The Globe and Mail‘s Margaret Wente says that despite the ponderous length of Harper’s “rap sheet”, he’s still not the worst PM in history. The National Post says that most Canadians rate Harper as “average” or “better”, rather than the “worst”. As always, there are lies, damn lies, pundits and polls.

You get the picture? All of the people who supported Harper’s dark decade and wanted four more years of the same have ignored the results of a $443,000,000 poll — the federal election of 2015. Time for a little peroxide; their corporate roots are showing.

How else can you explain their lust to continue the bombing mission in Iraq after Canadians overwhelmingly chose as PM a man who pledged, time after time, to stop the bombing? They’re as contemptuous of democracy as Harper himself.

And then there’s Jenni Byrne — the anti-Miss Conviviality. Byrne didn’t spend all those years around Harper for nothing. Just as Steve shifted the blame for everything to someone else — usually a subordinate or some primordial creature from Canada’s Liberal past — Byrne used the Globe & Mail to claim that the party’s drubbing in 2015 was not her fault.

I believe Stephen Harper had a lot of big accomplishments. It’s just that all of them involved taking a chainsaw to the country he inherited from Martin and Mulroney.

Jenni, you see, claims she knew the right jugular to attack. For some unknown reason, she says, her betters in the party settled on Tom Mulcair as the deeper threat. Since there was no sushi chef available to slice and dice Ms. Byrne and her self-serving drivel, the job fell to my capable colleague here at iPolitics, Susan Delacourt.

But there’s more to be said. You can take your history from Ms. Byrne — or you can take it from history. Every Con who sold his or her soul to Stephen Harper for ten shameful years in exchange for a nice office has been saying that the election was lost through poor tactics and strategy. Allow me to offer the counter-argument.

Trudeau had the Charter of Rights and Freedoms — as well as Barbara Streisand as a girlfriend. Brian Mulroney stood up for human rights in South Africa and stared down apartheid. Jean Chretien kept us out of a ghastly war that was sold on fake intelligence reports by megalomaniacs. Paul Martin fashioned the Kelowna Accord, a badly-needed new deal for Canada’s aboriginal people.

Steve? He cut the GST.

I believe Stephen Harper had a lot of big accomplishments. It’s just that all of them involved taking a chainsaw to the country he inherited from Martin and Mulroney.

The reason Harper was dumped like yesterday’s fish was not “fatigue” or “tactical” mistakes made during the 77-day campaign he inflicted on the country. It was because alarmed Canadians realized that this soft-spoken political iconoclast was deconstructing their country. Harper was Canada’s Paul Wolfowitz, despite the blue sweater and Beatle songs.

Consider the evidence.

Under Harper the economist, 400,000 manufacturing jobs were lost. Worse than that, he presided over a one-third drop in Canada’s value-added exports — the better to concentrate on rapid, unsustainable and environmentally harmful resource development.

While the rest of the industrialized world was investing in alternative energy sources to save the planet, Harper’s master plan was to subsidize pipelines and pollution and damn the torpedoes. That’s why he dropkicked Kyoto into oblivion and replaced it with the environment-killing omnibus bill C-38. And Rona now talks about how much the Cons love nature.

So great was this prime minister’s disrespect for Parliament that he shuttered the seat of government for an incredible 181 days for purely political reasons. He unleashed the Canada Revenue Agency on NGOs and environmental groups, using audits as a weapon against his perceived political enemies.

Harper’s attack on civil liberties was deep and disturbing. Bill C-51 gave police-state powers to agencies like the RCMP, CSIS and SEC. Some of you may remember that these same agencies were already spying on environmental groups and then meeting every year with representatives of the oil industry to brief them on the alleged threats facing their projects.

Harper the diplomat turned Canada into what former Conservative PM Joe Clark called a “denier and an outlier”. For the first time in fifty years, Canada couldn’t get elected to a seat on the Security Council at the UN, losing the spot to Portugal. He turned the world into a comic book narrative of good and evil, preferring bombing to talking whenever he had the choice.

And don’t forget, Harper was the first and only leader of a government in the British Commonwealth to be found in contempt of Parliament. If you want to know why he isn’t showing up for work, there’s your answer.

Michael Harris is a writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. He was awarded a Doctor of Laws for his “unceasing pursuit of justice for the less fortunate among us.” His nine books include Justice Denied, Unholy Orders, Rare ambition, Lament for an Ocean, and Con Game. His work has sparked four commissions of inquiry, and three of his books have been made into movies. His new book on the Harper majority government, Party of One, is a number one best-seller and has been shortlisted for the Governor-General’s Literary Award for English-language non-fiction.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.